Ray Leonard lives on. And now, he has decided to take one long, hard look into the mirror to help us understand why he turned to drugs and alcohol and how he patched the broken pieces of his life together.
He has written a book with Michael Arkush called, "The Big Fight: My Life in and out of the Ring," and it is a stark look inside the mind of a fighter, how he prepares, how he schemes and dreams, how he attempts to win the fight before the fight.
America got its first look at Leonard in 1976, when he was part of an Olympic boxing squad that won more gold medals than all the U.S. track and field athletes.
He had that glittering smile, he had that photo of Juanita, his high school girlfriend, taped to his sock, he had charisma, he had swift if brittle hands.
He also had a secret. He had been sexually molested by an Olympic assistant coach. He doesn't name the culprit in the book, even though the man is dead. And then, an older man, on the fringes of the sport, behaved inappropriately.
Leonard believes that those two chilling episodes were the catalysts for the bad behavior that followed, the womanizing that humiliated Juanita, the estrangement from Ray Jr. (despite those cuddly 7UP commercials they did together).
Leonard wants the reader to believe he was self-medicating when he turned to booze and drugs, trying to muffle the pain he felt, the anger he could not share, the depression that glazed every look into the mirror.
He shares the memories of a dysfunctional family, a painful childhood. His father drank too much belligerent whiskey. His mother could turn violent, and there's a frightening scene of his father staggering out of their home, begging a neighbor to remove a knife from his back after one more domestic dispute.
